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7) Combining everything into a .fzp

A project log for Fritzing: creating your own part

A 3 minute guide, as well as a "from scratch" guide

aryaArya 12/14/2016 at 01:230 Comments

If you want to create your very new part, here's the short way to do it:

  1. Copy a part from the stock library to "My parts" library
    1. Place the part you want to copy on breadboard/PCB/schematic
    2. While it's selected, go Part->Edit
    3. Go to File and use Save as new part
  2. Locate the part in your Documents folder
    1. It'll be in Documents/Fritzing/parts/user
    2. Throw in your svgs in parts/svgs/user
  3. In Parts editor, use the File->Load image for view to load new SVGs for the currently selected view (Breadboard/Schematic/PCB/Icon)
    1. You can also map pins to SVG elements there, though I didn't try it out myself.
    2. You can also edit pin descriptions, metadata and any XML fields
    3. Basically, Part Editor is a powerful thing.

So, the .fzp is just an XML file and if all fails, you can edit it easily. Adding pins to an XML is maybe the only troublesome task - if you need more pins, you could probably write a macro for copy-pasting those since manually copying and pasting those <connector> blocks is very simple but time-consuming and easy to make a mistake in. Link any SVGs you want, experiment away and it should work. If it doesn't, Ctrl+Z until it does and repeat the changes one-by-one.

Fritzing also has a Part->Regenerate part database menu entry, I figure it could help if you changed something by editing XMLs and something doesn't link with something. Anyway, if something doesn't link - regenerate database, restart Fritzing and so on.

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